This year in particular, 2022, I have been excavating various aspects of my family’s origins.
It started with cousin Adam Green writing to Radio 3 about my mother’s cousin Sid…
…then I started looking into my father’s family, initially hindered by some peculiar transcription from the 1921 census…
…latterly aided and abetted by the far more reliable offices of my cousin Angela and some walks around the west end of London.
While some of this was going on, in the spring of 2022, what would have been mum’s hundredth birthday had been and gone.
Within a bundle of papers I dug out while examining the various other stories, I found my mother’s birth certificate. I think it is a somewhat mysterious one.
It appears that my mum’s birth was registered as having occurred on 2 May 1922 on 22 May 1922. It seems that my Grandpa Lew subsequently took the trouble to traipse to the registrar’s office, seek and obtain a dispensation from the Registrar General and thus, some five weeks later, on 26 June 1922, the birth certificate was corrected to 1 May 1922.
This seems to me to be a lot of fuss for a minor correction. What’s in a day?
Perhaps Grandpa Lew thought 1 May to be an especially desirable date of birth. It is Labour Day after all and I know that he (and possibly the immediate family) would have seen that as a significant date for political reasons. Or possibly it was a more simplistic superstition, thinking that the first of the month was auspicious. Or might he simply have spotted it as a mistake and felt honour/duty bound to have an official document corrected.
Almost as mysterious is the fact that my mother was registered with the single, simple forename Renée. There was no precedent in either the Marcus nor my Grandma Beatrice’s family for such a name.
Indeed, I remember as a child there were cousins in the family (Sadie Moliver being one I remember in particular) who were convinced that mum was really named Rene not Renée and insisted on pronouncing her name in the more colloquial, single-e-no-accent manner.
The birth certificate proves that mum really was registered as Renée, but why?
I can only imagine that my grandparents were naming her after a well-known person, much in the manner that certain names crop up these days when a singer, performer or sports personality becomes iconic.
I can only find a couple of Renées who might have been thought of as stars at that time. Renée Adorée has a proliferation of acute accents, in my opinion and certainly looks the part.
But I think Renée Adorée’s silent movie fame in the UK would have been limited that early in the 1920s, even if, like Grandpa Lew, you have a couple of nephews, Sid & Harry, in the cinema orchestra business.
A better bet might be Renée Mayer, who had been a child star, a star of stage and was also making it in the silent movies in the UK in the early 1920s.
We’ll never know. I did ask mum once, but she demurred with “I think they must have just liked the name”.
Your speculation about the origins of Renee’s name reminds me of my own thoughts vis a vis my granddad Hector – as in where on earth did they get the name Hector from? My mother wondered if it could be some general called Hector. If this is the case, then my grandfather was named after General Hector Macdonald, hero at the time of my granddad’s birth, figure of scandal later on. In 1903, he shot himself in a Paris hotel-room over allegations concerning Sinhalese boys, for acts that might now be filed under “celebrating diversity.”